Currently there's no feedback when opening the desktop launchers. Starting apps via the Applications menu is out of scope here, see #15738.

These can take quite some time to take action, for example several seconds to open the documentation, and lead people to believe that they haven't clicked correctly.

This was reported by huertanix when training journalists who are new to GNOME.

During the user testing of the Additional Software beta, I also saw 4 out of 5 participants open an application multiple times by mistake. All 5 participants were otherwise GNOME users so this issue is affecting quite frequently experienced users as well.

According to Florian Müllner there's a freedesktop specification to provide feedback when launching applications.

Fix Tor Browser being called "Tails documentation" in the top bar (refs: #15101).

Fix against 14d5feb398f8d7aad89829c627045422d44cfadc.

Now that there were multiple .desktop files that claim the "Tor Browser" WM_CLASS, GNOME got confused and picked the wrong one. Apparently givingtor-browser.desktop its own StartupWMClass is enough to fix that.

What it would take to fix the launching of some of our applications. For example, the Tails documentation launcher on the desktop or the opening of Additional Software from the persistence settings.

I'm no expert in this field but I think it may depend on the application. In many cases adding a (correct) StartupWMClass= field in the .desktop file should be enough (examples I bet the two examples you're providing fall into this category. To test this, use xprop to get the WM_CLASS of the main app window, set StartupWMClass= in the .desktop file to this value, and retry launching the app from the launcher.

I felt the need to fix the startup notification for Tor Browser while working on #15023 (I believed it was a regression, and then noticed that even on Tails 3.8 there's no feedback when starting the browser, oh my) and while I was at it I've fixed it for the desktop launchers too. Now I'm not sure how to update the metadata here: I'm confused by the repeated changes of scope of this ticket. Is is on purpose that it's currently only about the desktop launchers?